the film also creates this really messy representation of pan asian-ness. it slaps together all this eastern asian iconography just to commodify and present as something for western consumption. reducing asian identity to only the visual is straight up fetishization.

deadkitty wrote:v cool of blade runner 2 to construct a world that completely excludes poc!! v great to see a vision of the future (in 2017!) in which androids will only be made in the image of white people!! v good to see a very large eastern asian population that is hinted at but completely relegated to the very bottom of the world's power structures!!

a film thats literally about racialization!!

As I came into this thread championing this movie, I'd like to discuss why I felt it was worthwhile to do so in light of the film's flaws (which are numerous). To respond directly to your comment, every sentence is demonstrably wrong if I take it literally.

1st sentence: I understand that for the sake of argument people exaggerate, but there are POC in this movie and their placement is not accidental. Even if we disagree with the effectiveness of the inversion, POC characters are repeatedly placed in positions typically occupied by white people when economically exploiting others. Luv has a hologram conversation with a black, female CEO of a mining colony. K, Madam, Coco, and a black, male detective are at the autopsy of the bones found at the farm. K visits the black, male orphanage leader who is clearly in control of quite an operation. K takes the wooden horse to the black, male pawn broker/black market dealer who is poised to make a killing if K handed off that horse.

2nd sentence: Replicants are made in the image of POC, but you could certainly be forgiven for not noticing this. The only POC replicants we see in BR2049 are those whose images flash for a few seconds when K reviews Sapper's military unit in his car after scanning Sapper's eyeball. This unit is stationed on Kolantha, which is explicitly named as a "sandbox for toy soldiers" in the Black Out 2022 animated short when the black, male replicant protagonist recalls his realization that the entire conflict was replicants fighting replicants. The revelation specifically occurs at 8:10.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrZk9sSgRyQ&t=821s

3rd Sentence: Though it is expressed in ways that can read as fetishizing Asian aesthetics, the advertisements in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese all convey to me a world in which companies from these countries own the means of production and have proven to be superior to their global counterparts. If they are the "winners" in this global economy, you can sure as hell bet they got off Earth at the earliest opportunity, and that would be why they aren't represented in the film even though they are represented in its world.

I understand the arguments/corrections I have made above only play into the hands of people who are not interested in increased POC representation in media, and doing the tedious work of defending movies and an industry that does not provide equal opportunity for POC and stories of POC only ends up making me feel like shit. So this is what I am starting to get the more I read criticism about and personal responses to the film: even though I personally see an absurd number of ways in which the text of BR2049 creates a world where the idea of white supremacy as a reality is impossible, it chose to tell a story about white, male characters in that world, which reflects a industry's belief that the audience would rather see a depressing story about white, male people than a positive story about POC.

In a story that puts so much emphasis on choice, what a sad choice to have made.

I think that the original's aesthetics are shallow Asian aesthetics because there's simply no explanation nor sense to be made outside of speculation. East Asian mega corporations have taken over earth yet the Tyrell corporation reigns supreme even as the LA its HQ is surrounded by has essentially become a futuristic Hong Kong/Tokyo. Despite owning the means of production there are no Asian people (or any PoC) to be seen in the elite. The film doesn't attempt to explain the contradictions beause, well, it's 1982 and they either don't care or they're not cognizant of them. You can come up with several theories but you'd be limited to blind speculation because there's simply not much to go on, because believability and issues of race are subordinate to aesthetics and making sure not to alienate white people.

BR2049 had the problem of inheriting the shallow aesthetics of the original, and I was hoping that a movie made today would be able to unravel and reexamine the orientalist setting of a movie created in 1982. So this time, instead of all the Asians being lower class in a world taken over by East Asia, the world taken over by East Asia has no visible Asians. And oh yeah, now there's also cyrillic and the CCCP everywhere, except there are no Russians.

Like I understand that exploring the setting in depth is not the priority of either movie, and that's fine. But when it's so willfully ignored it goes, for me, from being window dressing to being inconsistent and distracting. I'll admit that if I hadn't seen deadkitty's post before seeing the film I probably wouldn't have noticed. This isn't like the GitS movie, where Hollywood's reluctance to portray Asians (among other races) is put front and center by the lead casting choice. But seeing it from that lens does distract me, and does make me want my Asian half to be represented.

Deadkitty reminded me in the rep comment of the asian man doing Luv's nails while she's drone striking K, and that shatters the argument that BR2049 is being careful with the images it presents. It's one of the shittiest, laziest stereotypes and there it is on the big screen. I really had to reach to defend this movie, and I don't know why I came in with the attitude that people "weren't doing their homework." It's a bad attitude to have in any conversation.

Excellent, quick, critical read on geopolitical context for the aesthetics of the orignal Blade Runner.

This line sticks out to me due to my prior argument, and due to sci-fi precedent: "I won't believe the argument that Blade Runner is largely white because most humans left for off-world colonies. That's just silly."

As a piece of context, Ray Bradbury wrote two short stories about this exact concept. In these stories, the world's black population leaves Earth for Mars because of how they are treated, and then receive a white visitor many years later. He uses these stories to discuss the emotional burdens placed on the victims of racism, the value of diversity, and how racism simplifies a life but complicates the world. The final choice offered to the inhabitants of Mars is whether to continue the sins of the past or to mourn the monstrous effects of one terrible idea and hope to move beyond it.

Whether or not you find these stories compelling is entirely up to you. Having read these stories, I now recognize I was lenient with BR2049 because I knew you can ask and answer interesting questions using this concept. But the more I read in here and other articles the filmic evidence and emotional evidence only adds up to reveal BR2049 chooses to be "safe", predictable, lazy, and wrong in its representation of Earth's population.

Just watched and i have a bunch of thoughts that i will hopefully remember to post tomorrow.

But in the meantime. Jared Leno has to be the worst actor to still get into big movies of all time. He's dog shit. Any decent character actor could've made something really memorable out of that role and instead we get the most insufferable prick on the planet just playing his usual character of "most insufferable prick on the planet."

So Jay Leno's terrible acting and existence on this earth aside, Blade Runner was ... a land of contrasts.

There were some very lovely images. Villeneuve's films have always been very visually pleasing, Deakins has always been world-class behind the camera, and even Ridley Scott, for all his many deficiencies, has always had a knack for the spectacular set piece. I thought that the flying scenes were good, when the ship was zooming over stuff. All this is to be expected. Taken at first whiff, I found the ending of the film to be pretty bad. There was a stretch where I literally did not understand what was happening. And then I kind of stopped caring. It really takes a nosedive. Whatever.

Long rambling segment

Spoiler:

I just find the existence of this movie to be absurd and grotesque. If any story was to receive a sequel, Blade Runner, the film, makes the least sense. What on earth is the point? Scott's original film, to say nothing of Dick's story, wasn't really about setting up individual characters with independent narratives. Even Scott's Deckard was (overimplied) to be generic, totally meaningless, and even Scott's (vulgarized) story was more about the end of humanity as we know it than the journeys of individual humans. What could be compelling about extending the narratives of these characters, when their whole existence in the narrative is to point out their ultimate replaceability, genericity, redundancy?

More bothersome is the function of time, and this is something we can think about in regards to cyberpunk generally. Dick's story was brilliant because, in 1968, he was writing about a whole bunch of interesting stuff that hadn't really permeated the cultural atmosphere yet. He was writing speculative fiction: he understood well that science fiction should be a "thought-experiment" a la LeGuin, exploring the present through a fantastical imagined future. Science fiction should not be "about the future," as in attempting to predict, or forsee. "The future, in fiction, is a metaphor." The future in science fiction should be fictional first and foremost, and the function of time in science fiction should serve to enrich the fiction.

Fast forward to the 80s. Ridley Scott adapts Dick's story. He reifies some of Dick's fictional elements, written in 1968, on 1982 film stock. In the process he ensconced certain aesthetic qualities and stylistic hallmarks into the cultural atmosphere/superstructure. This is part of the whole cyberpunk thing. What is lost is Dick's relationship with both real and fictional time. Scott is now working on Dick's fictional timeline but he’s already lost most of the metaphor of Dick’s future (some of this is inevitable in the process of adaptation).

The medium of cinema requires a certain literalization to transfer the word to the screen. But Scott and his cyberpunks have a different relationship with the future in general. The science-fictional future is starting to lose the dimension of metaphor. It is becoming merely an extension of the present. Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism (garbled as his understanding is of anything East of Goldsmiths), is well-deployed here. The future is ceasing to be a space of imagination. The metaphor is dying. Scott’s future is an ossification of Dick’s. The only space for imagination, for innovation, is now the aesthetic, the styling of this dead metaphor.

The film Blade Runner has a more mechanical relationship with its fictional future. The fictional future is more of a direct extension of the present. The only space for change is the aesthetic, and that’s what has lasted and influenced following work. This is where we get cyberpunk as a sort of fetishization of a series of superficial motifs. What is Blade Runner remembered for? The “look.” The grimy streetscapes, the smog, the neon, the costumes. It’s the production design. (There’s a reason most big hollywood directors nowadays are special effects and production designers first, writers second, third, or tenth. Scott, James Cameron, Spielberg, Lucas, Nolan, etc.)

This is what makes this Blade Runner production so … spectacularly empty. We are extending the timeline, but not just that. We are extending it year for year in real time. We are marking the time with the body of real actors. Have I mentioned how the future began to cease being metaphorical and start becoming mechanical, a mere extension of the present, with the original film? My God! We now are faced with a future that is an exact, one-to-one function of the present, perfectly mechanical! Have I said that the metaphor was dying? The metaphor is now truly dead and its lifeless corpse lies in cold storage. We have a fictional timeline that is rigidly attached to the present and advances with it year by year. It can no longer even be said to be an imagined future, just an imagined version of our present reality that runs absolutely and strictly parallel to our own. Before we were faced with the horror of being unable to imagine a future without capitalism, now we are denied even the ability to imagine any future at all! \

bels wrote:Blade Runner 2049 is the final act completing the dadification of cyberpunk. From now on you aren't allowed to talk about cyberpunk unless you have a little bundle of joy in your life causing mischief. No more tech-wear fitpics unless your holding a tiny hand. Your 3a should contain moistened wipes and a blankie. Renaming the thread and setting the filter to replace "tech-wear" with "dadcore", "ninja" with "image conscious dad" and "teleports behind you" with "tries to provide a strict value system within a nurturing, caring environment"

What an important critical intervention from bels. We can see how, with the ability to even imagine a future without metaphor, much less the ability to imagine the future as metaphor, reduces the fictional work to direct expression, direct personification of our society’s underlying anxiety and paranoia. In this film, as bels illustrates, the result is just plain goofy, and as others have mentioned, also extremely racist. The modern filmmaker can truly think of nothing more profound than making a movie about the human race’s ability to reproduce and be reproduced, with an emphasis on human *race*. Thus we have this film, which is about a robot who wants to find his dad, and a robot-maker who wants to make his robots fuck and have babies, and all the robot babies and dads, by pure coincidence, are white. We live in a heteronormative, patriarchal society and there is no better example of this than the “dadification” bels describes. We live in a white supremacist society and there is no better proof of that than the fact that you could take the infamous fourteen words of the Nazis and use it verbatim and with perfect accuracy as a tagline for this film.

Of course this film is not alone in this. Most movies today to some extent reveal an underlying obsession with reproduction of society, usually along racial lines (watch any movie by Aronofsky). Of course this is a product not necessarily of the malaise upon the individual souls of the artisans responsible for this particular or those particular movies, but a result of the mode in which movies like this are produced. It's unnecessary to belabor that point. And we don't have to choose between analyzing the problems of this film and analyzing the problems of the genre, the mode of cinematic production, or our society as a whole (@BrokeBoy). We can use this film and other individual works to analyze those things as critics have done for centuries and continue to do.

I think it’s very worth noting that in the genre of “cyberpunk” particularly, there is a well-established tradition of problems, and these are problems that this film generously participates. One of these is misogyny and the objectification/fetishization of women which is fairly obviously (again, metaphor is dead!) shown with the whole holo-girlfriend thing, and the naked robo-woman whose belly Jay Leno cuts open for no reason, and, like, every other characterization of women in the film. One of these is Orientalism which has been discussed in this thread, and this is a particularly noisome and persistent presence in cyberpunk (not even St. Gibson is free of sin in this regard!).

So I think we should take Blade Runner 2049 as an opportunity to take a good hard look at the genres of science-fiction and cyberpunk and think about where these genres are taking us and the function they play in society. Bels says the film “is the final act completing the dadification of cyberpunk” and I would go further and say the film “is the final act that reveals the death of cyberpunk” and that our task is to bury cyberpunk, and whether or not cyberpunk is able to rise from the dead in three days will be proof of its enduring merit.

I also agree philby that the aesthetics of the film though "big" are definitely watered down compared to the original. Compare:

One is a neo roccoco throwback. The other is just the present day with a statement coat. (Also note the leaden, inanimate state of Ryan Gosling's acting, such that it appears as though he has literally been cast in a mould and cannot move of his own volition)

it has been really enjoyable to watch taylor just throw oodles of money at her music videos recently. really cool. song is pretty good imo really catchy but i don't really care for the drops. that video makes almost 0 sense with the song but it's sick lol

hey guys new here i made a collage of popular techwear instagram people with a blade runner 2049 backdrop to see how theyd look against a real-ish cyberpunk backdrop. i browse here but never post. thought it would be a good time to start lol. so.. hi

black panther : boring formulaic marvel comics narrative, and i was really disappointed in the way the afro-futurist technology was depicted- all very gleaming, stylised and comic book-y. really struggling to find anything interesting about the whole film beyond obvious woke take.

kickingthefly wrote:black panther : boring formulaic marvel comics narrative, and i was really disappointed in the way the afro-futurist technology was depicted- all very gleaming, stylised and comic book-y. really struggling to find anything interesting about the whole film beyond obvious woke take.

Well, it is a superhero comic book movie. At best it did what all the decent comic movies did (i.e. nothing in the last several years), framed the story and aesthetic within the bounds established by the source material for a coherent experience. At worst it was as goofy as even the best of superhero comics (they are all fundamentally goofy and silly).

Off-topic but this is why the Sam Raimi Spider-Men were so great. They openly displayed all the goofy contradictions of their source material, in which a man who was also a spider was shown to do normal stuff but also fight crime like a spider-man. And people were like ... this is too silly, show us a more gritty, realistic man-spider hybrid. So we got Andrew Garfield doing the fucked up half-whisper line delivery he does in every film he's in, and now the inexplicably more vanilla actor who replaced him.